BARACK OBAMA is the junior Democratic senator from Illinois and was the dynamic keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He was also the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister and was raised in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago. His first book, DREAMS FROM MY FATHER: A STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE, has been a long time New York Times bestseller. Dystel & Goderich (2007)

You’re undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me — an agency assistant at the time. There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more. Miriam Goderich (2012)

Now that President Obama has done enough back-room deals to get the Democrats’ health care legislation through the House of Representatives, he can resume making plans for a visit to his childhood home, Indonesia. The trip was on for this week, but the White House cancelled it so Obama could stay in Washington to push through the Bill.

Once he lands at Jakarta, capital of the world’s largest Muslim state, he probably won’t make the same mistake he made a few years ago in Kenya, when he let himself be photographed wearing a turban. Still, he may find it hard to resist the urge to go native.

One of the reasons a lot of Americans find Obama oddly foreign is that he had an oddly foreign childhood: his formative years were spent in Indonesia. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born there. The rest of Obama’s childhood was spent in Honolulu, a Pacific Ocean capital soaked in East Asian culture.

What’s this got to do with Britain, or indeed with Europe? Plenty. Obama is the first US president who was raised without cultural or emotional or intellectual ties to either Britain or Europe. The British and the Europeans have been so enchanted with ‘America’s first black president’ that they haven’t been able to see what he really is: America’s first Third World president.

If you doubt it, remember the kick in the teeth he gave Britain over the Falklands just a few weeks ago. Obama had his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, fly to Buenos Aires to give American support to President Kirchner’s call for international negotiations over the Falklands. Amazing. What was more amazing is that all we’ve heard out of Number 10 and the Foreign Office since then is that it doesn’t mean anything.

Oh, yes it does, and Washington insiders know it does.

I’ve just been in touch with Dr James Lucier, a former US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staff Director, about all this. He tells me: ‘Culturally, Obama detests Great Britain. He sent the bust of Churchill back without a fig leaf of an excuse. He insulted the Queen and the Prime Minister, giving them ridiculous gifts.’ At one point, ‘he refused to meet the prime minister.’

Here is what is happening, though the British Government seems oblivious of it. The Obama administration is ready to dump the Old World in pursuit of the One World.

Britain is being dumped. The special relationship, whatever is left of it, is over. Britain losing control of the Falklands to Argentina would just be collateral damage.

But France is being dumped, too. Obama’s ostentatious refusal to have dinner with President Sarkozy during his visit to France last year was no accident. Rather than meet the French president, Obama went off to a restaurant with his wife Michelle.

Germany is being dumped. Obama has been little more than dismissive of Chancellor Merkel. Russia in turn will be waved aside.

Most spectacularly of all, the European Union has now been comprehensively dumped. The American president has refused to attend what is supposed to be a US-EU Madrid summit in May.

What we have shaping up, but what the British Government doesn’t yet grasp, is that Obama has a conscious policy of down-grading America’s relationship with, first, Britain and then with the rest of Europe.

He believes that the US — yes, his own country — and Britain, and the leading European countries, too, for that matter, are imperial powers who ruthlessly exploited the Third World for their own profit.

And Obama is America’s first Third World president.

Forget Obama’s Chicago black cadence. It is a fake. He copied from the kind of black preachers that were unknown to him until he was a grown man and inventing his political image.

What the Obama administration has near-wiped from the president’s personal history is that his only childhood links with America were as a schoolboy in a fashionable private school in Asia-dominated Hawaii, where he was raised by his white, bank executive grandmother.

Chicago is not Obama’s homeland. It never was his formative influence. The president’s world view is more aligned with that of Indonesia.

You can be sure the gift Obama gives the President of Indonesia will be something more than the dvd box-set of old Hollywood movies he gave to Gordon Brown. The US president’s manner on the trip to Indonesia will be more the manner he showed to the King of Saudi Arabia last year. The king received a deep bow, something never done by any US president before. Obama also kow-towed to the Emperor of Japan and to the Chinese premier.

What’s going on? According to Dr Lucier, Obama’s policy is to disestablish the United States, Great Britain and Europe from the hegemony of world power, and elevate in their place the hegemony of the Third World under international governance.

Remember, Obama is a deracinated individual. He has no roots. He is a man from an Asian-Pacific background bred to no admiration for the ancient constitutional history which, until now, has reached across the Atlantic to bind America and Britain.

The president actually feels that the US Constitution, which grew out of Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights, is ‘inadequate.’

Indeed, Obama has stated that, because the US Constitution guarantees only ‘negative rights’ — that is, establishes what the US Government may not do to individuals or to the sovereign states — instead of giving people guarantees of food, shelter education and health care and the rest, it is ‘inadequate.’

That is one reason he has worked so hard to get the health care legislation through Congress. It is undoubtedly unconstitutional. Already, the attorneys-general of Florida and South Carolina are poised to challenge its constitutionality in court. At least another dozen state attorneys-general may join in the suit.

Obama has made it clear he despises both the US Constitution and the British tradition from which it springs.

His decision to send his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to Argentina to give support to President Kirchner is part of this anti-British atttitude. Mrs Clinton has supported President Kirchner’s demands that the fate of the Falklands be decided by the United Nations decolonisation committee.

It is all part of the same Obama world-view. This interference in South American affairs is not part of the old yankee — yanqui — imperialism. The important thing to note is that the Obama administration is not stepping in to decide the fate of the Falklands itself.

No, it wants to turn the dispute over to a Third World-dominated instrument of international governance, the UN.

One might imagine that Obama is willing to back Argentina over the Falklands because he thinks America has something to gain from it. That is not the reason. There is no profit for the US in cultivating the Latino presidents, and there is no particular policy to do so.

Rather, US support for Kirchner’s demand that the Falklands question be turned over to the UN is just another opportunity for Obama to strengthen the ideological world system which he hopes will one day overwhelm the old Anglo-Saxon Common Law America.

His vision is for the US to abandon its Constitution and its laws, which are tied to Britain, the country for which he has shown such disdain.

Let me start with Winston Churchill. (Laughter.) You know, I don’t know if people are aware of this, but in the Residence, on the second floor, my office, my private office is called the Treaty Room. And right outside the door of the Treaty Room, so that I see it every day, including on weekends, when I’m going into that office to watch a basketball game — (laughter) — the primary image I see is a bust of Winston Churchill. It’s there voluntarily, because I can do anything on the second floor. (Laughter.) I love Winston Churchill. I love the guy.

Now, when I was elected as President of the United States, my predecessor had kept a Churchill bust in the Oval Office. There are only so many tables where you can put busts — otherwise it starts looking a little cluttered. (Laughter.) And I thought it was appropriate, and I suspect most people here in the United Kingdom might agree, that as the first African American President, it might be appropriate to have a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King in my office to remind me of all the hard work of a lot of people who would somehow allow me to have the privilege of holding this office.

Now, when I was elected as President of the United States, my predecessor had kept a Churchill bust in the Oval Office. There are only so many tables where you can put busts — otherwise it starts looking a little cluttered. (Laughter.) And I thought it was appropriate, and I suspect most people here in the United Kingdom might agree, that as the first African American President, it might be appropriate to have a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King in my office to remind me of all the hard work of a lot of people who would somehow allow me to have the privilege of holding this office.

Not surprisingly, the man who currently sits with Churchill looking over his shoulder every day rejects all three narratives. Sir Peter Westmacott, who next month finishes his stint as British ambassador to “the single most important country in the world”, says the bust was only ever on loan as a personal gift from Tony Blair to George W Bush for the duration of his presidency.

“So, to be honest, we always expected that to leave the Oval Office just like everything else that a president has tends to be changed,” he explained in a valedictory interview with the Guardian. “Even the carpet is usually changed when the president changes.”

Some Britons took offense when Winston Churchill’s bust was replaced with King’s. But the decision to return the Churchill bust to the British – it had been presented by former Prime Minister Tony Blair to Bush on loan – had been made before Obama even arrived.

Sure everybody makes mistakes, but making a sensational false charge against a new president at the very first opportunity he allowed reporters into his Oval Office on Day One of his presidency sure looks like one of those narrative-confirming, “too-good-to-check” stories of journalistic lore that just happens to portray Trump as a racist “white nationalist” in the eyes of progressives. Zeke Miller of Time was allowed into the Oval Office as a pool reporter and tweeted out reports that the Churchill bust was back (true) and the MLK bust was gone (false). He was quickly corrected.

While I credit him for acknowledging his mistake and apologizing, he certainly was ready to believe what he tweeted out without bothering to do a thorough examination of the evidence. It was news that was fake, so I guess it is #fakenews, even if a semi-honest mistake.

This is a perfect anecdote for president Trump to resurrect whenever he feels like it. The very first moment the media got access to him, they tried to portray him as an enemy of our national hero of racial equality.